Broadcasting legend Dick Irvin receives his Order of Canada

Legendary Canadiens play-by-play announcer Dick Irvin officially received his Order of Canada during a ceremony at Rideau Hall on May 7.

Irvin first learned he was going to receive the Order of Canada in early December for “his contributions to hockey as a beloved broadcaster and author, as well as for his charitable activities”

Irvin’s broadcasting career included 33 years at Hockey Night in Canada – 17 of them beside late play-by-play announcer Danny Gallivan, who died in 1993. Irvin has written six books. The last one, My 26 Stanley Cups: Memories of a Hockey Life, was published in 2001.

Irvin was also chairman of the sports celebrity dinner for the Montreal Children’s Hospital for 24 years.

Earlier this year, Irvin was a guest on the HI/O Show on The Gazette’s hockeyinsideout.com website, joining the Gazette’s Dave Stubbs and me, and told the story about how he learned he would receive the Order of Canada.

“It was a shock,” Irvin said. “It was like a stone-cold phone call from a nice lady at the Governor General’s office in Ottawa. I had no idea why I was getting this phone call and it turns out this whole thing had been in the works from a lot of wonderful friends of mine for over two years.

“I said to her, ‘Have you got the right number?’ And then she finally said to me, ‘Are you going to accept it?’ I guess I was kind of stunned … not saying anything. ‘Oh, yes, I’ll accept it.’

“It’s been very nice,” he added.

Congratulations, Dick. Very well-deserved.

You can watch the entire HI/O Show with Irvin, in which he looks back on the favourite moments of his broadcasting career and talks about some of the people he worked with, including Gallivan, Don Cherry, Howie Meeker and Bob Cole, by clicking here.

Below is a column I wrote about how Irvin’s father, Dick Sr., helped save the Canadiens when they were once – believe it or not – on the verge of folding:

(Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Habs were once on brink of folding

PUBLISHED IN THE GAZETTE ON APRIL 12, 2014

STU COWAN
GAZETTE SPORTS EDITOR

The Canadiens played in front of their 400th consecutive sellout crowd of 21,273 at the Bell Centre Thursday night when they lost 2-0 to the New York Islanders.

That streak will continue when the Canadiens wrap up the regular season Saturday night against the New York Rangers and into the playoffs, however far the Habs go. The last time the Canadiens didn’t sell out a game was on Jan. 8, 2004, against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The top ticket price for the playoffs at the Bell Centre is $432 and fans will be lining up during the intermissions to buy $11 beers and $4 hotdogs.

Business is good.

But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, legendary broadcaster Dick Irvin – who remains a walking, talking hockey history book – can tell the story about a time when the Canadiens were on the verge of folding and the role his father played in helping save the franchise. It’s a great tale.

The Canadiens finished the 1939-40 season in last place in the seven-team National Hockey League with a 10-33-5 record, their worst year ever, scoring only 90 goals in 48 games. Two years earlier, the Montreal Maroons had folded after posting a league-worst 12-30-6 record.

“The Maple Leafs played the last game here (in the 1939-40 season) and attendance was estimated at 1,500,” the 82-year-old Irvin, a new appointee to the Order of Canada, recalled this week. “The Maroons had folded two years before – lack of interest I guess – and here were the Canadiens in the same boat. There were just no crowds.”

The Forum held about 9,500 at the time and all the seats were brown.

In one of the six hockey books Irvin has written – The Habs: An Oral History of the Montreal Canadiens, 1940-1980 – former Hab Ray Getliffe told Irvin what it was like to be traded from the Stanley Cup-champion Boston Bruins to Montreal before that dismal 1939-40 season.

“I was traded from Boston to the Canadiens in the summer of 1939 after I had played on a Stanley Cup-winning team,” Getliffe recalled. “I knew it would be quite a letdown, but I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was. There was no discipline on the team, it was every man for himself. Pit Lepine was our coach and he never seemed to worry. I remember one night Boston beat us 6-2 at the Forum. Right after the game, Pit put on a big coonskin (raccoon) coat he always wore in the winter, gave us a big wave and hollered, ‘So long, boys, see you tomorrow.’ But what I remember most of all from that season is the empty brown seats.”

The NHL realized there was a big problem in Montreal and called a meeting after the 1939-40 season to try and fix the situation. Dick Irvin Sr. had coached the Toronto Maple Leafs to the 1940 Stanley Cup final, losing in six games to the New York Rangers, and had decided to resign after the season with the blessing of Leafs owner Conn Smythe.

Irvin Jr. remembers his father telling him the story about that NHL meeting.

“The league had a meeting and they said: ‘Look, we can’t lose Montreal,'” he said. “If they lose the Canadiens, that’s it. Montreal’s gone, there’s no team here at all.

“They talked about the lack of discipline on the team, and everything was a mess,” Irvin Jr. added. “And Smythe said, ‘I’ve got just the guy to send in there, we’ll send in Irvin, at least as a start to coach the team.’ So that’s what happened. My Dad coached his last game for the Leafs on a Saturday night, came to Montreal a day or two later on a train, went up to (Habs owner Senator Donat Raymond’s) house in the Laurentians with (new general manager Tom) Gorman and they discussed things and they came down to the Forum the next day and they signed his contract.”

Irvin Jr. says his father and Gorman were a good mix, adding: “Dad was the hockey guy, Gorman was the promoter. He must have given away tickets galore in those days.”

The new coach immediately addressed the discipline problem, instituting a weekly weigh-in for the players. He also insisted his players have a 3 p.m. steak dinner on the day of a game. Kenny Reardon, who was a rookie defenceman on the 1940-41 team, told Irvin Jr. the story about his Dad showing up early in the season at a team dinner in New York and asking where veteran centre Paul Haynes was.

“My Dad said, ‘Where’s Haynes?’ And Toe Blake, who was the captain, said: ‘Don’t worry about him. He’s here, but every time we come to New York on a Sunday he goes to the opera,’ ” Irvin Jr. recalled with a chuckle. “So my Dad said: ‘Oh, the opera, eh?’ Haynes never played another game in the NHL. But that was the kind of stuff that was going on and somebody had to put an end to it and, obviously, he did.”

The Canadiens finished with a 16-26-6 record during Irvin’s first season behind the bench, but continued to improve as future Hall of Famers like Maurice Richard, Elmer Lach, Butch Bouchard and goalie Bill Durnan joined the team.

The Canadiens would win their first Stanley Cup in 13 years in 1944 and would win two more with Irvin behind the bench, in 1946 and 1953. Irvin Sr., who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as a player with the Chicago Blackhawks, would spend 15 seasons behind the Canadiens’ bench, the longest tenure of any coach in team history. By the time Blake took over as coach for the 1955-56 season, the Forum had grown to hold about 15,000 people. Blake would win the Stanley Cup in each of his first five seasons behind the bench and eight in total as Canadiens coach.

Irvin Jr. says he still wonders what might have happened to the Canadiens if his Dad had won the Stanley Cup with the Leafs in 1940 and decided to stay in Toronto. He also shared this week some other stories he learned over the years about the business of hockey in Montreal, including one involving Frank Selke Sr., who was the Habs’ general manager from 1946-64, winning six Stanley Cups.

Frank Selke Jr. told Irvin in his book: “One of the first things my Dad did when he got there was take out that famous millionaires’ section in the north end. There were some 4,000 seats that were priced at 50 cents. The Forum had only 9,600 seats and roughly 40 per cent of the seats were priced at under $1. I quite clearly remember seeing a box-office statement from the previous year when a sellout of the building in the playoffs grossed $11,500. You wonder how they could have survived. Then again, great players like the Rocket and Bill Durnan were likely being paid about $4,500 to play.”

Selke Jr. added: “The first major job my dad undertook was painting the place to get some colour in there. You and I could have retired on the money they spent that year in paint.”

That’s how the Forum – and now the Bell Centre – got its famous red seats instead of the old, empty brown ones.

Irvin Jr. said that the most his father ever earned as coach of the Canadiens was $15,000.

And what would his Dad think if he was alive today to see the Bell Centre? “He’d go with the times,” Irvin Jr. said.

“His answer (when comparing players and generations) always was a good player then would have been a good player today, and today’s good player would have been a good player yesterday.”

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